3x11 "We All Scream for Jet Stream"

Check your bags and try to avoid a TSA cavity search as you board tonight’s double-feature flight into the unknown. Craig takes the yoke and performs aerial maneuvers over, under and through the classic Twilight Zone episodes “The Last Flight” and “The Odyssey of Flight 33.” In the final analysis, only one will emerge unscathed. Along the way Craig struggles with French pronunciations, extols the glory of stop-motion dinosaurs and powers through some kind of sinus malfunction. Mon dieu!

Theme: “Neither Here Nor There (9/22/2019 Revision)” by Twin Loops

“Sunny” performed by Dave Pike (from the album Jazz for the Jet Set, copyright 1966 by WEA International)

“Interlude” performed by Thievery Corporation (from the album The Richest Man in Babylon, copyright 2002 by Eighteenth Street/ESL Music)

“On Danse a la Villette” and “La Vraie Valse Musette” performed by Basil Bunelik (solo accordian)

“Royal Air Force March Past” performed by the Central Band of the Royal Air Force (from the album On Tour: Central Band of the Royal Air Force, copyright 1995 by Cala Records)

“Serenata” performed by The Jonah Jones Quartet (from the album Great Instrumental Hits, copyright 1961 by Capitol Records)

"The Return of the Red Baron" performed by The Royal Guardsmen (from the album Snoopy and His Friends, copyright 1967 by Laurie Records)

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Between Light and Shadow: A Twilight Zone Podcast is a nonprofit podcast. Music clips and dialogue excerpts used herein are the property of their respective copyright owners; we claim no ownership of these materials. Their use is strictly for illustrative purposes and should be considered Fair Use as stated in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107.

TZ Repeat: "The Last Flight" (8/19/1960)

The summer reruns continue with "The Last Flight," a solid episode, mostly notable in Twilight Zone history as the first Richard Matheson teleplay produced. It was first aired on February 2, 1960, and repeated 50 years ago tonight. Here's my original writeup on the episode.

Um... not much to say. It's quite good, but not among my favorites. Season 1 is like that, though... most of 'em lie between excellent and outright brilliant, so a perfectly competent and clever episode might seem somehow lacking in comparison. That's how "The Last Flight" is for me. If another series had produced it, it probably would've seemed more impressive. But c'mon, when you're up against episodes like "Perchance to Dream," "And When the Sky was Opened," "The Hitch-hiker," "The After-hours"....

No disrespect to Mr. Matheson (who is still with us). It's really a very good script, well-executed, well-acted, well-shot, etc.

Okay, enough. I think I've made my point.




Next week: They're your neighbors. Your friends. Your kids play together. You barbecue together on summer afternoons. But when strange things start happening around the neighborhood... well, you might want to watch your back.

TZ Promo: “The Last Flight” (2/05/1960)

Tonight's installment isn't sci-fi/horror icon Richard Matheson's first story used on The Twilight Zone, but it's the first one actually written by him from the ground up, from conception to script (versus an existing short story being adapted by Serling). Interestingly, the episode was the seventh to be produced for the series' first season, but eighteenth in line to be aired. It's no reflection on the quality of the episode, however (as opposed to, say, "The Mighty Casey," but we'll get to that one in a few months): "The Last Flight" is quite good, not necessarily one of my favorites, but certainly engaging.

British actor Kenneth Haigh is marvelous as William "Terry" Decker, a cowardly WWI RAF pilot who flees an aerial battle by flying into a strange cloud and lands… at an Air Force base in modern-day France. It's your basic trip-through-time-to-put-right-what-once-went-wrong affair, which by now has been done to death in films and TV (Quantum Leap is the most obvious example), but in 1960 was probably quite an intriguing concept (okay, it kinda still is, I must admit… I'm a sucker for time travel stories). Directed by William Claxton, the bulk of the episode is essentially a talking-head piece with an extended dialogue between Decker and two Army officers, but it never gets boring. The bookend scenes (the initial landing, then the escape) are brilliantly staged.

On the music front, much of the stock score pulls from Bernard Herrmann's composition for the series' pilot, "Where Is Everybody?".  Cues from this particular score will pop up again and again throughout the series' run.

Coming up: War is hell. Okay, that's a given, but what if you could see death on the faces of your fellow soldiers? That's a whole new kind of hell, and we'll explore it next week.